Back in December, the government announced the launch of the Public Sector Reform and Innovation Fund.

Since the fund encourages regions to practise a “test and learn” approach to improving public services, there’s been a flurry of interest from central government departments and local authorities in the role that bodies like LOTI could play in helping realise its ambitions. Indeed, there’s talk of setting up more LOTI-esq entities around the country. 

I think that’s a promising idea. To make the case, below I share three specific ways in which the collaborative innovation model we practice at LOTI is more relevant than ever.

You’ve got to see it to solve it

What does it take for multiple public sector bodies in a region to be able to work together effectively to innovate and reform public services?

First, they need to be able to see how issues transcend their administrative boundaries. (“You’ve got to see it to solve it” to borrow a wonderful phrase I picked up from Robin Hobbs.) 

A critical enabler of that common visibility is data collaboration: the ability to join up, analyse and act upon data at a regional scale. This has the reputation for being really hard. Happily, this is where bodies like LOTI can help. In London, LOTI helps councils identify issues where data can play a useful role. We design and project manage data initiatives covering dozens of organisations. We work with partners to provide the technical infrastructure to share data. And we advise on the legal and data ethics aspects. 

Over the past five years, LOTI has reduced the time it takes to do the information governance parts of data sharing between all London boroughs and other public sector partners from around two years to just weeks. We’ve joined up London’s data on issues like Digital Exclusion, Electric Vehicle Charge Points and rough sleeping helping the teams working on those themes spot patterns and trends and mobilise activity across the whole city.

According to an evaluation by the GLA in November 2023, LOTI’s work facilitating data sharing had already saved London’s public sector ~£1.4m. 

Capacity for collaboration

The second thing you need is capacity. Quite simply, it has to be someone’s full time job to make collaboration happen.

Sure, organisations in an area can self-assemble and work together on common projects for a while. But those projects tend to fizzle out eventually because they’re too dependent on goodwill, ad hoc relationships and have to be delivered on top of already very busy day jobs. 

At LOTI, our team of 10 dedicates an enormous amount of time to listening to our community of 28 boroughs, London Councils and the Greater London Authority (GLA) to facilitate conversations about common problems, opportunities and interests, and then put those ideas into action. We connect more than 1,500 colleagues working in digital, tech, data and innovation roles through more than 100 events a year, 10 communities of practice and dozens of projects. 

In short, we provide the infrastructure for collaborative innovation to happen.

A Method for Test and Learn

So we have the visibility of the problems and the capacity to do something about them. Next we need a method.

For those seeking a model for bringing many different public sector organisations in each region to work together on innovative solutions to public sector challenges, I’d urge them to take a look at LOTI’s Sandbox Method.

In a nutshell, the Sandbox is a physical space where new preventative service models, tools and technologies can be tested and evaluated without risk on realistic mock-ups of key public services. The concept combines service design, technology, data, open innovation and immersive theatre to rapidly find answers to key public service challenges. 

Here’s how it works:

• The Sandbox involves mocking up and literally acting out some representative service journeys in an event space. The service journeys can be aligned to specific missions and/or target cohorts of people . The stories to be acted are created by user researchers who first conduct extensive research with local residents and public sector workers to reflect the detail of local service challenges.
• Representatives from community groups, local public sector, third sector and private sector are invited to a “performance” of the service challenges using immersive theatre techniques. Participants thereby get to witness the service challenges from end-to-end from the perspective of the citizen. This encourages everyone to think about the cohort or individual needing help, rather than their organisational silos. 
• Participants discuss the problems they can see. They are then invited to propose solutions that can be developed iteratively over the course of several weeks in a build → test → learn cycle. Some solutions may be designed from scratch. Others may entail using existing products, services or organisations. 
• At a final event, participants come to witness a ‘before and after’ performance where the solutions are acted out so public sector colleagues can witness their impact on the service stories and see for themselves if they could work for them.

The benefits are clear. The Sandbox method:

• Enables multiple public sector partners, community groups, local residents, third and private sector in a region to gather around the same problems without just thinking about their organisational silos.
• Completely de-risks trialling of radical new service models (because solutions are tested on the mock-up of the service). 
• Enables rapid testing of new innovations in a build → test → learn cycle.
• Ensures solutions are holistic (covering people, tech, data, process), not just bolting on new tech to broken service models.
• Enables public sector staff to experience rather than just read about solutions – making it easier to see which solutions are viable.

The Sandbox for Adult Social Care

LOTI has recently been trialing the Sandbox method in London by looking at Adult Social Care. We started by mapping the current ASC system and its pressure points:

We created two stories of Londoners who try to navigate the care system: Mrs S, a 70 year old woman living with diabetes, and Aleesha, a 40 year old woman trying to arrange care for her husband who has early onset Alzheimer’s.

In October 2024, we hired an event space and invited colleagues from community groups, local government, health, third and private sectors to see the stories performed by actors. 

Many participants noted how the process revealed the sheer complexity of the current care system and how it can inadvertently  push residents to the most expensive forms of care. Colleagues from NHS and local government shared how much better they could see the full patient journey. And external innovators from third and private sectors appreciated having the chance to see the problems to be solved in more detail.

Working with the LOTI team over a three month design sprint, together they came up with six ideas for more preventative solutions, which we performed at a final event on 29 January. A separate blog on those solutions by my colleagues Genta Hajri and Anjali Moorthy who have leading and delivering this work will appear shortly.

A model for regional test and learn?

In summary, as the government considers how to deliver the aims of the Public Sector Reform and Innovation Fund, nurturing organisations like LOTI that provide the data collaboration, innovation capacity and methods for test and learn could really help.

Investing in teams, not just specific projects, is one one the best ways we can assure that the public sector is capable of developing the financially sustainable service models of the future. 

Clearly, effective public sector reform will require many different organisations to bring their skills to the table. In London, there’s incredible work taking place in individual boroughs, in London Councils (LOTI’s host organisation), the GLA, regional groupings and our public sector partners. LOTI looks forward to working in partnership with all these organisations in the coming months to help the capital address its biggest public sector challenges.

For those interested in learning more about the LOTI model, we’ll be hosting an explanatory webinar on 4 March. If you’re from central or local government and would like to know more in the meantime, please do get in touch for a chat.

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